Fundraiser to send Sworebytheprecious to Detroit to report on you-know-what

Sworebytheprecious, a regular in the AgainstMensRights subreddit, is trying to raise money so she can get to Detroit to report on that A Voice for Men conference you might have heard about. And you can help!

Lissie (akaSworebythePrecious) wants to get to Detroit to report on the convention held by A Voice for Men and Paul Elam. She also wants to start up a website for Project Dark Horse. Who wants to help?

Our goal is $1000. We’ll be posting receipts. We want to rent a car, get a room, and get a plane ticket. I also want to talk to some of the protesters who were bothered last Saturday.

So far she’s raised a little over $200, but I’m sure we can help her raise a lot more than that. If she goes over $1000, the money will go to charity or to help build a website for Project Dark Horse, dedicated to exposing the bullshit of the Men’s Rights movement in general and AVFM in particular. More details on Dark Horse here, and on her fundraiser here on the GoFundMe page.

Comments

Yeah, um, maaayyyybe we’re being unfair to Shane, but you won’t call him out on being unfair to us by condescending to us and assuming his just-found-out-about-the-manosphere ass knows more about it than we do just because? On a site that’s literally about mocking that exact subject, and in what’s rather more our space than his space, since I don’t recall seeing him here before?

Dude comes in here to mansplain MRAs to the regulars, I don’t care if anyone’s “a little unfair” in telling him he’s unwelcome to behave that way here.

in his 20/20 interview, a perfect demonstration of his strengths and weaknesses, you’ll notice he has trouble looking into the eyes of his interviewer. on camera, he often looks as if he wants nothing more than to find an exit, his discomfort clear. i don’t trust a man who has trouble looking people in the eyes. i especially don’t trust a man like him who has trouble looking women in the eyes. he has no trouble with some of the women who agree with him.

I wouldn’t go so far as to distrust all men (or people in general) with eye contact issues since that’s a common trait of people on the autism spectrum and many anxiety disorders (which is not to say I think Paul Elam fits either; not being a psychologist, he comes across to me as narcissistic or even anti-social). I’m on the high end of the spectrum and I find looking at people’s faces in general to bring overwhelming feelings of being judged. It along with monotone, stilted speaking leads to problems with people thinking of me as unsettling before they get a chance to know me.

Something that I think warrants investigation is the question of “how many MRAs might have untreated autism spectrum disorder?” It’s certainly something that fits with the Nice Guy™ mythology since the tortured “logic” of “insert X niceness, receive Y sex and affection” is something that fits with a high-logic, low-social brain and is the kind of thing I’ve thought about as a teenager. It’s a delicate subject since it can easily lead into coming across as excusing their behavior or reducing people to a set of symptoms (a constant problem I see in discussions of mental illness).

If you want to look at that, you have to include the “being a misogynistic piece of shit”, which isn’t associated with autism, Asperger’s or any other condition. Given it’s been proven that the “But men don’t understand body language, waaaah!” and “Men don’t understand a soft no, waaaah!” bullshit is lying, that harassers and predators understand it all perfectly well but choose to ignore it, the whole idea of including looking at autism is not only ableist, it’s a huge red herring.

Let’s not conflate autism spectrum disorders with being an MRA. I haven’t met any people with autism spectrum disorders who are arseholes. Believing in MRA tropes is not a defining symptom of any of these conditions.

You may find that some people with autism spectrum disorders have some MRA beliefs, but that will be correlational and not causal. So fuck off with the “MRAs are that way because they’re not mentally ‘normal'” BS. Armchair pop psychology diagnosis is BS.

I think the “insert X niceness, receive Y sex and affection” concept is something that men are socialized to believe. It’s also not exclusive to MRAs at all. The same thinking is prevalent in films and television, and is kind of a cultural norm at this point. The transactional aspect of it could be ascribed to high-logic reasoning, but the idea as a whole is pretty deeply rooted in social history.

I side-eye the idea that looking on human socialising, let alone sexual intimacy, as transactional is logical at all. If anything it sounds more like straw-Vulcan stuff for those who’ve had a DIY basic-decency-and-empathy bypass. If that were logic, then logic could go take a running jump.

True. Then again, it’s difficult for me to untether the concepts of “logic” and “social” because they occur together for me. I was trying to address possibilities of the “high-logic, low-social” thinking that Alex M referenced. But my understanding of ASD is limited.

My knowledge of ASD is very limited too, but it’s what WWTH just said: there’s a trend of blaming assholism on it, and that sucks all round. There’s no way to do what Alex M mentioned without it being simultaneously ableist and implicitly giving assholes another get-out-of-jail-free card.

I should also mention that this “high logic” stuff gets my hackles up, because while it has little enough to do with logic in any formal sense, it has everything to do with mansplaining, men deriding and dismissing women’s opinions about anything as “too emotional”, and all the fucking shit misogynists go in for. I loathe people doing that.

Nah, it was what Alex said earlier. I am just so tired of people with clearly no psychological/ psychiatric training coming in and diagnosing people. Basically: unless you can see the person to assess them, you can’t diagnose. And that is also a point about people (including psychologists and psychiatrists) who “diagnose” the mental health conditions of historic people. There are now academic papers published on how this is a bad thing.

No need for apologieds, bunnybunny, you didn’t come off that way at all. Like pallygirl said, it flows from what Alex M said, and my hackles-up comment was more of a “this stuff always gets me” thing – though I’m sorry I didn’t make that clear!

And that is also a point about people (including psychologists and psychiatrists) who “diagnose” the mental health conditions of historic people. There are now academic papers published on how this is a bad thing.

::ears prick up::

Do you know of any available to read online? My second-most-loathed-writer is one who shat all over Louis and the Cardinal with her Freudian victim-blaming routine. I’d dearly love to see papers shredding that sort of shit.

Besides the fact that most psychiatric/psychological disorders are quite modern, and the terms cannot be back-translated to the language of historical figures, there is also the issue of:
– need to establish that symptom duration is correct
– need to ensure that alternative diagnoses are discounted (not bloody possible to do when your “patient” is long dead)

Standard clinical practice is also that the clinician needs to interact with the client. Obviously, this is not possible for deceased persons of interest.

There are also the following cultural influences:
– writings that are pro- the person will have suppressed negative behaviours whereas writings that are anti- the person will emphasize them, and may also suggest ones that didn’t actually occur
– there is evidence that psychiatric disorders are strongly influenced by current cultural mores, for example catatonic schizophrenia was one of the more common schizophrenias observed in women in the 19th century and there are clinicians now who have never seen this, also hysteria was a common diagnosis for women (with consequent uterus removal as the cure). Given this, and that few mental conditions were even recognised in the late 19th century, it is surely unwise to diagnose a 20th/21st century disorder onto a long-dead person.
– timing of onset is not well known for many people. Age at first onset is an important marker for some conditions, and this information is likely not well recorded in the historical record.

In conclusion, any psychiatric/psychological diagnosis given to a historical figure is heavily suspect. As is any medical diagnosis (try linking diagnoses based on the four humours to current diseases).

Too true about the medical diagnosis business. Even for someone recent, changes in diagnosis and knowledge over the intervening years shows up. F’rex, it was standard, and still is, to say Prince Albert died of typhoid. Typhoid was much-diagnosed then, and even though his symptoms as described don’t match it at all well, nobody’s any better off with ideas now. I’ve seen everything from stomach ulcers to cancer suggested as the cause. Ditto (even more so) for anyone further back: Louis’s described as having intestinal/pulmonary TB, or ulcerative colitis, or Crohn’s disease. (Charming thing about having a Freudian picking at your personality: you almost get blamed for physical illnesses. Ulcerative colitis is all from being stuck in the anal stage, dontchaknow.)

🙂 I get so annoyed when people do internet diagnoses, for many of the same reasons, and also because so many people doing it aren’t fucking qualified anyways. It’s the same with the MRAs: poke fun at a feminist sociology professor (social sciences) but use fucking worse than pop psychology reasoning and incorrectly use social science statistics (e.g. surveys). As a social scientist by trade, these guys really piss me off for being such stunning idiots when it comes to social science data. And then they have the unmitigated gall to call out a professor in the social sciences.

And many thanks for the links pallygirl (should it be a purrrr, to counterbalance the grrrr?)

It especially annoys me when someone gives a “diagnosis” of a historical figure (based on whatever) and then interprets everything they did or might have thought as if that diagnosis explains their behaviour. Perfectly circular logic.

A few years ago I read something which explained Henry VIII’s increasingly autocratic behaviour as he aged in the light of him being malnourished, a diagnosis apparently picked because it seems like the least likely thing anyone would have thought of.

Then again, there’s sometimes contemporary reference to a symptom which was not viewed as such at the time and which was recorded without being understood, and that can be a bit more persuasive. George III’s purple pee makes it seem at least possible he did have porphyria – however, *at least possible* is about as strong as it gets.

Until I get my time machine, my cloak of invisibility and my babel fish – oh, and my degree in medicine – and can go an check.

Yeah, I should probably get out of the habit of arguing with them. They all get on the twitter at about 8 AM my time and all start yelling at once, and they keep including me in the replies long after I get bored and wander off.

I’m glad everybody posted all the pitfalls with armchair psychology (especially self-diagnosis; claiming to have a genuine mental disorder to feel special is grossly insensitive). These are all major issues in casual discussions of mental disorders, which is why this topic has to be handled really carefully. Also, as a correction, I should have said “high-procedure”, “high-math”, or “high-routine” instead of “high-logic”. The idea that everything including social interactions can be broken down to a flow chart is a hurdle many on the spectrum have to overcome, especially if they have mind-blindness.

I’m not saying we should apply labels to any group or frame their hatred around a psychological disorder. What I’m thinking about is how hate groups in general exploit vulnerable, fed up people through circular ideologies that absolve them of personal responsibility and pin the blame for all life’s problems on a designated group. Understanding how they target and cater those ideas to people on the autism spectrum as well as the early warning signs somebody might be be receptive to general conspiracy theorist thinking could be used to protect vulnerable people from these groups.

I’m not saying we should apply labels to any group or frame their hatred around a psychological disorder. What I’m thinking about is how hate groups in general exploit vulnerable, fed up people through circular ideologies that absolve them of personal responsibility and pin the blame for all life’s problems on a designated group.

You should have stopped there. Hate groups focus on people who are disaffected for whatever reason. You don’t have to be mentally ill or neuroatypical to be taken in by scapegoating mentality.

Understanding how they target and cater those ideas to people on the autism spectrum as well as the early warning signs somebody might be be receptive to general conspiracy theorist thinking could be used to protect vulnerable people from these groups.

There’s zero evidence that there’s a higher proportion of people with autism in the MRM than in the general population. It isn’t appropriate to diagnose internet commenters with autism. There’s no evidence that people with autism are more likely to hate other demographic groups. At least not that I’m aware of. Unless you have some credible evidence to back your theory up please stop.

especially self-diagnosis; claiming to have a genuine mental disorder to feel special is grossly insensitive

I was self-diagnosed multi for six years before finally getting officially diagnosed. There are many good reasons to self-diagnose; not all of us can afford healthcare, and not all of us want to be stamped with a certain diagnosis for life. Also, doctors are fallible.

Also, I highly doubt assholes in the manosphere are specifically tailoring their bullshit to hit vulnerable autistic people. That’s horseshit.

One thing about Alex’s original comment comment that’s TRUFAX though — can we not perpetuate the bull about people who don’t look you in the eyes being untrustworthy? Yeah, MRAs aren’t, for a shit ton of reasons, but plenty of decent people have issues with looking people in the eyes.

I’m touchy on that one since I get it, I’ve never worked out how much eye contact is appropriate to avoid both “untrustworthy” and “creepy”…I tend to err on the side of the former since I don’t want to be creepy, but yeah, THAT one bit of Alex’s comment is worth its salt.

Oh, this thread is from yesterday. Sorry, real life got shitty and I took a day off. My 55g tank…idfk…I woke up yesterday to it being dead except for three cories who’ve been relocated to the 29g while I scrub the SHIT out of the 55g.

@Argenti I’m glad you did mention the eye thing – I was going to on friday and then was away from electricity for much of the weekend. I also have a problem with figuring out eye contact, so I avoid it a lot. It makes people think I’m a snob, but I prefer that to panicking over whether or not I’ve stared too long.

Re not making eye contact, it’s also cultural. Apparently if I give some Pasifika males direct eye contact, that’s showing I’m flirting with them. Then you also get the (classist?) stuff like movie actors who order crews not to talk or make eye contact with them, when they’re on set.

Thanks pallygirl. And yeah, the thing about movie crews is classist, even at the lowest levels of theatre the actors seem to forget they need to techs (we had a saying “without us you’d be naked on a bare dark stage and nobody would be able to hear you”)

Try not to feel guilty. If you can, it’s possible to get dairy from places that are nice to their animals! (I worked on an organic dairy farm for a bit, and it gave me a great respect for the common cow. As far as I could tell, the farmer took good care of them, gave them plenty of space and dietary variety.)

I don’t like killing animals for meat, but unfortunately I’ve found that if I don’t eat meat, I get sick eventually. (And no, it’s not a lack of protein, I’m on a strict meal plan; it’s very specifically MEAT that I seem to need.)

Oh, I must look into the organic standard then and see if they treat their cows better. I loathe the taste of soy and I would hate to give up cheese now I can get vegetarian varieties – vegetarian Edam is super yum.

There’ll probably be a thread on this later, but Swore has a new vid up about how Dean Esmay lost his shit after she got press credentials, and he’s seemingly convinced that her sole purpose in going to the conference is to help DAVID FUTRELLE make avfm look bad. He’s really got a persecution complex about you, Dave. He throws the word “sadistic” around a lot. Also there seems to be very little communication between avfm representatives, as JB demanded a press pass and then DE wanted to shut her out on the grounds she had one. Ummm, what?

So basically, so far as I can figure out, unless Swore comes out of this with a glowing testimonial to the amazing transformative power of avfm and their fantastic work *coughcough* they’re already poisoning the well so they can claim she’s just another back-stabbing bitch out to double-cross them after they so magnanimously let her into their He-Man Woman-Haters Clubhouse.

(Also getting REALLY FUCKING SICK of hearing male survivors of rape and domestic violence trotted out as human shields every time MRAs are criticised. “You can’t say bad things about us because if you do YOU DON’T CARE”. Such a bullshit derail it doesn’t even deserve refuting, but hearing it from Esmay instead of seeing it in text was especially vile.)

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.